Not only is this a COMPLETE baseball game, its also a Japanese dating sim! It looks like RBI baseball... but its not.
My first impression: Wow! This game has ALL of the MLB players, (I don't care personally, I hate baseball, so I don't care if real players are in it or not, but it IS impressive!). The games announcer knows all of their names and stats, and the little deformed Mii's "look" like the actual players. It has all of the stadiums, all of the alternate uniforms, you can even customize pitching/ batting/ fielding animations for any character. That is pretty in-depth for a cartoon looking game. And this is just the standard "baseball" part of the game. You can play a full season taking care of every aspect down to the practice regiment between games, or just pick up and play an exhibition game if you'd like. This was a little bit much "micro-management" for me, since the cartoon art style gave me the impression it would be much less involved. Now a real baseball fan will be happy with this "best of both worlds". For me personally as a non-fan, it was boring to be honest. When it came time to actually play a game....
Eh. The mechanics are very customizable, you can have the cpu play most of the field and base running for you if you need; you could even have it pitch and hit if you wanted (why would you?). But this just made it too uninvolved. So I wanted to play all the parts myself, and just felt like "this is why i don't like baseball games". It wasn't my cup of tea.
So what part did I like most? The goofy 'Tulips' side game of course. It was barely baseball at all! In fact you only ever even swing a bat a few times and only after hours into this mode, and you NEVER play outfield. Now this was my kinda baseball game! You are more focused on working a job to buy equipment, training at baseball practice to boost certain stats (its a balance game between sleep and training), hitting the books to keep your college grades up, and dating local girls. There are apparently many routes to take in this game because I never even ended up going on a date once even though there was a whole stats section devoted to dating! i just working and trained more, and didn't choose to invest time in that category, so the girls you can meet remained black sillouettes and I never even got to meet them. It was a fun story game with funny characters, and funny things happening to your character. But it was too short! I mean it was hours long, don't get me wrong, I got my moneys worth. But to do ALL of the stuff they crammed in there, that seems impossible. As i said i didn't even get to the dating part (though i would have liked to). Even with focusing on training so hard, this "fun" mode was really difficult. I actually spent all these hours playing and LOST when I got to the end!? Imagine if I HAD gone after the ladies? So my major complaint was that I wish i could have spent more time with this mode. After finishing it once, i really do not want to go back and do it again, but if it had been longer i would like to have been able to stick with it and still be playing now.
Lastly i think the games weak point for me was the character creation. Sounds odd because you can make whoever you want with whatever stats you like. Whats wrong with that? Well since you aksed, it all comes down to the fact that I spent al LEAST three hours making my favorite Mets, (okay the only Mets i knew from back in 1987), and when they get out onto the field, no matter how perfect your Darryl Strawberry is, the announcer will call him by another name. BAH!!! You HAVE to pick a name for your character that the announce will call EVERY time he does something, but you can only pick from current baseball guys names. So it ruined it all when he steps up to the plate and he looks like Strawberry, he hits like Strawberry, but the announcer is calling him Wright. So i went and deleted all of my made characters that i spent hours on, because it was driving me mad. I even tried to find names that sounded like my made players, but that didn't work at all.
So overall what score I would give this game, and what this game might actually deserve from the mainstream audience as a score will differ wildly. I would give it a 7. I played it, I went through the Tulips thing, and played a few season games, now I'm done. A real baseball fan might give it a 9, I cant score it perfect because it does have flaws. But as a baseball game, it is close to perfect. For me and my world, it was a good effort for a genre i don't like. So I give it a 7, but if you like baseball its a 9. i will settle on 8!!!